BEALE STREET DYNASTY: SEX, SONG, AND THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SOUL OF MEMPHIS
by Preston Lauterbach
DREAMS TO REMEMBER: OTIS REDDING, STAX RECORDS, AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF SOUTHERN SOUL
by Mark Ribowsky
New York Times Book Review, May 29, 2015
In 1917, the composer W.C. Handy titillated the nation with “Beale Street Blues,” his song about a true-life Sodom and Gomorrah in downtown Memphis. “If Beale Street could talk, if Beale Street could talk,” he wrote, “married men would have to take their beds and walk.” Fats Waller, Lena Horne and the former Beale resident Alberta Hunter all went on to sing it, but probably few people today know about that post-Civil War nirvana for liberated slaves. On Beale Street, freedom ran raucously, dangerously amok. Races cohabited and brothels thrived; heated games of dice-rolling often ended with the flash of switchblades. Cocaine was sold over the counter. The anarchy was set to a soundtrack of early jazz, much of it provided by Handy, the bandleader and composer of “St. Louis Blues.”
But as Preston Lauterbach explains in his new book, “Beale Street Dynasty: Sex, Song, and the Struggle for the Soul of Memphis,” racist backlashes had also made the area an embattled place. In May 1866, a town official issued a bloodcurdling decree to white supremacists: “Kill the last damned one of the nigger race.” In three days, 46 blacks died, five women were raped and 91 homes burned.
“Beale Street Dynasty” adds a fascinating chapter to civil rights history. But for all the hatred it depicts, this gracefully written book never loses sight of the fun that made Handy exalt that stretch of dirt road. A century after Beale Street’s heyday, a different sort of black-power story unfolded in Macon, Ga. Mark Ribowsky details it in “Dreams to Remember: Otis Redding, Stax Records, and the Transformation of Southern Soul.” The hero is a young soul singer who, in the 1960s, helped turn “one of the whitest bastions of the post-Confederate South into the vital core of black music.”
Robert Church, the kingpin of “Beale Street Dynasty,” had faced heavier battles. In 1865, Church, a fair-skinned ex-slave, applied for a license to open a Memphis pool hall. Turned down by the county clerk, he built his establishment anyway. When the city took him to trial, Church’s lawyer successfully invoked, perhaps for the first time, Congress’s brand-new Civil Rights Act. That move helped trigger the 1866 riot. But not even a bullet in the head could stop Church, who became the star mega-mogul of Beale Street. Like many of the district’s czars, he was both valiant and corrupt, a charmer and a thug. In a startlingly rebellious move, he opened what Lauterbach — the author of “The Chitlin’ Circuit” — calls “sex slavery plantations,” brothels stocked with white women. Underworld and money-laundering connections multiplied his wealth.
Church might have remained a big-time hooligan were it not for the influence of another Beale Street star, Ida B. Wells, a civil rights journalist who was later a founding member of the NAACP. Her writings had apparently encouraged him to put his riches and his energy to good use for Beale-area blacks. Thereafter, he became an angel to the black community. Church gave loans to start-up businesses, built affordable and attractive housing, and helped black newspapers to flourish.
Provocative as he was, Wells outshines him in Lauterbach’s book. Long before the birth of Rosa Parks, Wells faced down the public transportation system by suing a railroad company whose conductor had refused to honor her first-class ticket, then strong-armed her off the train. As a writer, Wells might have focused solely on denouncing racists; instead, she also pushed the black community to improve its own lot: “So long as we permit ourselves to be trampled upon,” she wrote, “so long we will have to endure it.” Her often militant views courted controversy — notably in 1891, when she praised a group of Kentucky blacks for setting fire to a town where a black man was lynched.
After Church died in 1912, his son Robert Church Jr. carried on the crusade. But unpunished lynchings proliferated — and as Lauterbach writes, “the police force terrorized black Memphis.” When he details the 1933 murder of a local black teenager by cops, his book connects chillingly with the present.
Musically, at least, the street thrived again around 1950 as a launching pad for B. B. King and other blues and soul stars. Their peers took wing in other Southern cities, including Macon, the home of Otis Redding, the raspy-voiced, steamily emotional singer and songwriter. Not for him the slicked-up commerciality of Motown; as Ribowsky writes, Redding turned himself “inside out extracting the blackness of each word he sang.”
He made it to No. 1 anyway — not with a soul song but with the folklike “(Sittin’ on) the Dock of the Bay,” which spoke TO Vietnam-era lost souls. It was released posthumously. On Dec. 10, 1967, his private plane had plummeted into a Wisconsin lake. The singer was 26.
Ribowsky — whose books include “The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams” — evokes the fire of Redding and his Memphis label, Stax Records, the cradle of Southern soul. The Stax sound was raw, ferocious and sexual, and its stars — Redding, Sam and Dave, Wilson Pickett, the Beale Street habitué Rufus Thomas — succeeded on their own terms. Ribowsky quotes the Stax executive Al Bell: “When the white audience discovered us, we didn’t get whiter — they got blacker.”
Redding himself had no identity crisis. He didn’t hesitate to cross his father, a stern, disapproving Baptist deacon, by pursuing show business — especially a kind that “screamed” sex. In Redding’s 1965 hit “Respect,” which he wrote, his message — "Got to, got to have it” — was no double-entendre; it took Aretha Franklin, in her rewritten version, to give the song feminist and civil rights weight.
Yet to fans such as Janis Joplin — who famously said, “Otis is God, man” — Redding was the soul of empowerment. Early demise aside, he was no tragic figure. Redding was smart with his money, comfortable in his skin and not self-destructive. Chronic philandering seemed his main sin, with muddled politics a close second: In 1967 he supported a former segregationist, Ronnie Thompson, the Republican nominee for mayor of Macon.
Ribowsky tells the story with nonstop energy, while always probing for the larger social and musical pictures. He vividly evokes locales — Macon, he writes, “suggests at once the courtly, honeysuckle Old South and modern urban decay” — as well as the Stax sound and Redding’s art. Of “Try a Little Tenderness,” with which Redding wowed the 1967 Monterey International Pop Music Festival, Ribowsky describes the performance’s slow, gospel-like beginning. Then, “raising the volume, the pace and the key, horns blaring all around him, he barreled into a near seizure of semi-lyrical Otisisms.”
If the author’s unreined enthusiasm can turn t gushing — “It only takes a listen to his records or a glimpse of him onstage, always a revelatory experience, to be left breathless,” he exclaims— and more than a few clichés, his insightfulness and storytelling gift trump all. Helped by revealing quotations from musicians, he recalls a time of interactive music-making that seems worlds removed from today’s computer-assembled, Auto-Tuned pop. “Playing behind him,” says the trumpeter Wayne Jackson, Redding’s band felt “all the pain and the joy. He made us better musicians that way. . . . A guy starts singing like that and you know it’s more than a song.”